Change the initial conditions of an experiment, and the same laws of nature will yield a different outcome. So, too, in a theory of politics, alter the suppositions even a little and a different picture of the world will result. This is what Georgetown business professor John Hasnas does to John Locke’s political philosophy in his lucid, lively, and logical new book, Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society. Hasnas tweaks Locke’s assumptions about the state of nature just enough to produce a world of law and peace without the need for government, much less a sovereign leviathan. No need for men to behave like angels, either. To reap the benefits of civil society, Hasnas argues, people need only be a little less short-sighted, and a little more willing to compromise, than Locke imagined them to be.
Locke himself began by borrowing the approach of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, imagining the condition of men without government. Finding them willing to follow the law of nature and to mind their own business until things get out of hand, Locke supposed they could form government by law and structure it to be
